A response to Your Turn: White students 'underrepresented'
The Post, March 5, 2008, by Lyn Bowman, with allusions to Maybe it's just me: Stats don't reflect black student life The Post, March 5, 2008, by Alissa Griffith:
The letter talks about white, non-Hispanics being underrepresented in Ohio public universities. The writer claims that there is an over-representation of minorities in colleges in Ohio. He claims that the underrepresentation of minorities in Ohio's public schools is only displayed at three universities in Ohio, but the tragic overrepresentation of minorities at nine other universities far exceeds the need to allow more into college. He suggests that a poorly funded, academically unsuccessful school close and force the minority-raced populace to flee to the three schools that lack the diversity he so desperately detests. That way the minority situation is take care of, and we can focus on the bigger problem: the 12,000 white students that need to be brought in.
Considering the fact that the white population of Ohio is nearing 90 percent white, and the minority populations concentrated in the major cities of Columbus (30 percent of population minorities), Cleveland (50 percent of population minorities) and Cincinnati (45 percent of population minorities), one would think that whites would feel pretty comfortable coming to Ohio colleges and feel pretty secure about the prevailing whiteness around them. But obviously, even with these three main cities being the only cultural-epicenters in the whole state (where a majority of the whites at public universities come from), many come from towns that have 100 percent white populations. Some come to OU and find that the four out of 100 black people they will see is a bit too much diversity shoved in their faces at once.
In a column in the same newspaper, a female is stunned that people have time to write whole news articles on the obvious:
For the second year in a row Ohio University ranks as the whitest campus in the state.No one doubts this statement. What is Lyn Bowman so weary about? In order to support this fear, he had to go outside of the school he attends, into a very specific statistic about ' not all universities, colleges and community colleges in Ohio, mind you ' only public universities (which are mostly in or around a urban sector) getting overpopulated with these unneeded minorities. As one comment for Griffith's column points out: ...In future employment you may not just be writing opinion columns
you may have to do some research and cite your stories.
The anonymous critic writes this about the writer's absence of references in her article, which is about studies that state the obvious. Griffith, being a black female, talks about the problems in the black community and her thoughts on why there is such a lack of color on college campuses. She gives suggestions from the ground up on how to get more representation of minorities at OU. Seeing as though the plight of black people is displayed on television specials (like Nightline, CNN, the news and movies galore) and in African-American classes every day, it would seem like problems in the black community would be known to all people (whether they care or not is a different story), but even more so by a black person, whom this information affects the most! I find that Griffith's ethos in her article is well established. However, Bowman, who plays the role of the white victim, feeds straight into the hand of the person who told Griffith that whites are suffering because of low-incomes, just like the minority students, but have to pay money that minorities don't have to because of race. He then calls this predicament reverse racism. But Bowman, with all of those creatively twisted biased statistics, is not criticized at all.
Why do I call his sources biased? See, if Bowman had been a critical analyzer, he would have found the statistics that I did, and he wouldn't have seemed so scholarly compared to poor, belittled-by-a-stranger Griffith.
From the information I found through the Board of Regents Web site, (http://regents.ohio.gov/perfrpt/2006/Performance_Report_2006_final.pdf), page 13, 77 percent of the students enrolled in Ohio's colleges are white and non-Hispanic. The national average is 61 percent. Thirty-one percent of the students enrolled in college in America are minorities; in Ohio, 16 percent of the undergraduate student population consists of minorities. In Bowman's article, he complains about the 78 percent of whites in universities, compared to the 84 percent of college-age whites, a difference of six percent. This is his whole main idea: Six percent of white students in Ohio are not in public universities. There are only 13 public universities in Ohio. On the other hand, there are 126 private schools (collegeboard.com); all of the private colleges have a white population of 50 percent or above (many are 75 percent to 90 percent white, non-Hispanic). Those statistics cannot be circumvented. They cannot be played with and questioned for omissions. That is truth that Bowman, Anonymous and the whites of OU, Ohio and America cannot turn into another fake example of victimization. No one is victimizing white people. Whites are not underrepresented anywhere in society that they did not choose to run away from (i.e. the cities) because of minority overpopulation. Where the heck does that terminology come from, anyway? How can you have an extreme over-representation of minorities? I guess when you are a scared white person, using words like overpopulation and extreme is the only way to recruit your audience for some major minority-hating cause. Sounds like minority educational genocide to me.
Sydney Epps is a freshman journalism major.
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